Quietly over the holiday weekend, the Bee, a community newspaper covering SE Portland, reported that Franklin High School had closed the doors to the robotics club, Team 1432, aka Mahr's Metal Beavers. The club had been part of the FIRST Robotics Competition, a group formed over 20 years ago to foster interest in science and technology. Franklin states the club had to close because it did not have a faculty member on staff serving as an advisor, and no teacher volunteered to take it on. Now, the doors to the shop where the group met are locked, and they were unable to even get their robot out for an OMSI display. The group finally was able to get their robot when the principal allowed them to, but their equipment is still locked away, and funds they have raised are unavailable as well. The team says they raised $7,500, which they may never get back, and the team fears the school or the district will keep the funds.
While Franklin's business manager Steve Matthews said that the school will teach smaller-scale robotics courses, it does not give students the chance to learn and compete with others. The school is keeping clubs for Yu-Gi-Oh! and other anime' themes, and comics and gaming, but a club that would actually teach problem solving and scientific skills cannot be kept because a teacher can't be found to be an advisor, and therefore cannot even meet on the school's campus, despite the auto shop area's vacancy. The Portland Public Schools require a teacher supervise any student group or organization other than those that are religious, political, or sports themed. The team now meets at the Knights of Pythias, but without their resources. Hopefully local high tech companies like Intel or Nvidia will step up and help them out, since this club may have future employees for these firms. If the schools will not invest in the future, companies will have to.
Yet once again, the district has shown that education is not their top priority, and keeping kids engaged in areas that interest them is immaterial to them. Students who are interested and engaged are far more likely to stay in school and be better citizens. The increase in gang activity in the city can be tied to the cut backs in schools. Disengaged and disinterested students will find other ways to belong and have purpose.
Oddly, the Portland news outlets have been quiet about this story, save for the Bee. This story has attracted national attention, though, when MythBusters hosts Adam Savage and Grant Imahara tweeted links back to the story over the holiday. Grant has been a mentor to Bay Area robotics teams, helping kids there discover what he grew up loving. He received an electronics engineering degree from USC and was one of the operators of the R2D2 units in the Star Wars prequel movies. Both Grant and Adam have hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, so many people nationally and internationally now know about the disgraceful way Franklin handled this with their students. At a time when the President is calling on the MythBusters to help with science education, it serves as another highlight of how broken our schools are to see a club canceled because no teacher wanted to step up. How 5 quirky special effects artists from San Francisco who host a fun edutainment show are supposed to save science education in America is a mystery, since they should only be supplementing what kids learn from their teachers and their parents. Yet if schools keep continuing on the path that Franklin is on, perhaps MythBusters will be all that's left.
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